We intended to do the North Fork Skykomish-Pass Creek-Cady Ridge-Dishpan Gap hike in the Mountaineer's Backpacking Washington this Fourth of July weekend. This year has a high snowpack and we've just finished a week of record high temps in Washington.
This loop high has three river fords that are marked on the map in the Mountaineer's Book. We found two of them to be impassable. We were intending on doing the lollipop hike in the counterclockwise direction.
After hiking about 3 miles you reach a junction with Pass Creek. About 5 minutes after turning off at the junction onto the Pass Creek trail, the first river ford isn't so bad. We took off our boots and put on our sandals. Water was no more than a foot deep. The second ford is about a minute later. It was extremely swift and would have been at least waist deep. We decided it was impassable, so we camped at large, lovely campsite between the two fords (it can easily be shared with four or more groups). We didn't get a photo of the deep river ford, but we met two other hikers who also gave up. You'd have to have some serious river crossing skills and be willing to get very wet to make it across this weekend--more than we were willing to risk.
The next day, we left our camping gear behind, returned to the North Fork Skykomish Trail, headed for Dishpan Gap. About an hour and a half up that trail, we encountered the other ford on the map. I've attached pictures. The river is tumbling down a very steep area here. There were two ways across, either wading maybe thigh deep through the rushing water, or across a large log that's kind of perched at the top of a waterfall. While I think we could have made it across the log, we still would have had to drop from the root end into the water. It would have been really hard to get back on the log on the return, so we decided not to do it. We could have crossed this river one of these two ways, but we just weren't into the risk or the cold. It's also pretty snowy in the 10 minutes leading to the ford and we didn't know whether it might just be snow all the way up.
Despite being turned back--twice!!--this hike goes through absolutely lovely old growth forest, with lots of wildflowers and wildlife (a bear, a large snake, lots of frogs). We had a great weekend.
Other downsides: An insane number of mosquitoes greet you at the parking lot, and the campsite between the two fords at the start of the Pass Creek trail led us to use 1/4 container of 100% DEET and to keep our head-nets on until after dark.
Other upsides: We got to see a fairly large black bear. It was on the trail about 20 min from the parking lot. It did just what it was supposed to do--once it saw us about maybe 20 yards away, it bolted into the woods.
This will be a great 3-day backpack trip once the rivers shrink.
Comments